Book Review – Stand Out Social Marketing

According to digital marketing expert, Mike Lewis, social media represents both the biggest marketing challenge and the biggest opportunity faced by marketers today.

To succeed in a sea of overwhelming possibilities, Lewis maintains that businesses must figure out how to differentiate themselves and stand out amongst competitors. His book, Stand Out Social Marketing, is designed to help social marketers do just that.

Lewis’ book aims to help marketers find data relevant to business needs, learn how to interact with audiences to generate meaningful data, and use data to accomplish ROI-related goals. The bulk of the book revolves around Lewis’ 6 key practices for achieving stand out social marketing.

6 Practices of Stand Out Social Marketing

1. Pay attention.

Good social marketing requires that one first learn what customers are saying and doing in order to create effective strategies. Lewis shows how to build “attention matrices” as a way to find new places to establish brand presence. He also reviews scoring systems and monitoring strategies to determine where customers are in the conversion funnel.

Lewis’ golden rule for good content states that it should focus on the needs of prospects and customers – not on you, your company, or your product. For B2B companies, this means industry-specific educational content that drives better understanding of issues and challenges in one’s space. He provides a step-by-step approach to defining a specific content strategy, and he reviews the importance of content-rich landing pages and blogs for both SEO and conversion strategies.

4. Create a distinctive presence across all social channels.

Lewis recommends developing a brand persona that is easily recognizable. To assist with the process, he provides a framework to identify current assets and determine possible strategies for different web assets.

5. Develop a stand out management strategy.

Lewis informs readers that managing a distinctive social media presence requires significant resources. He recommends building a team that understands the relationship between specific business objectives and social media strategy. This section also discusses managing workflow, audit trails, and permissions before concluding with a review of basic policy guidelines.

6. Measure for ROI.

Understanding and measuring ROI, Lewis says, provides the key to stand out social media. He reviews 9 different metrics useful for tracking social marketing ROI (e.g. conversions, reach, activity ratios.)

The strength of Lewis’ book rests in his ability to articulate connections between established best practices and to orient them around the concept of differentiation as a key to successful social media marketing. Stand Out Social Marketing is a worthwhile read for marketers, executives, and entrepreneurs who are either learning the ropes of social media campaigns or are looking to get more out of already existing programs.